University of Virginia Library

Distribution of Takings

The clicker did not distribute this manuscript equally among the compositors named in it. He must have had a number of considerations in mind. He had to give copy to the different compositors according to their rate of

work and the need to keep the setting-rate in proportion with the rate of imposition and proofing; and he had to dovetail the setting and imposing of these proofs with those of the other books the compositors were working on.

Whatever further principles governed his method of distribution, it was surely intentional that, apart from the distinct break between Parts I and II of the novel, the chapter divisions were never used as breaks between compositors, even though they were sometimes used to start a new cast-off galley within a taking. Although in the page-proofs and first edition a new chapter would start on a new page, in the galley-proofs there was only a gap of ten lines between chapters, and therefore it was probably convenient for one man to set the juncture.

The clicker generally ensured that a new taking began with a new paragraph (not merely each new galley as noted above). The only exception occurred very near the beginning of the work and was probably untypical for that reason. In fact there are only twenty-three transitions between compositors, and in fourteen of them the compositor started his new taking with a new paragraph on the first line of a manuscript page, which must have minimised the extent to which compositors needed to pass copy to those setting adjacent text.

The striking feature of the takings is not simply that they were rather large, but that some of them appear to have been set by compositors working in pairs, simultaneously setting alternate stints. The names of the nine compositors, Cook, Rendell, L. Bristow, Notley, Moore, Deacon, Wright, Knowles and F. Bristow, seem to occur, recur and disappear in random succession in the manuscript, but when it is surveyed as a whole, the names group together to indicate only ten fundamental divisions of the text among them.

The general pattern is not immediately evident because the marks are scant at the beginning of the work. Cook's name is the first to appear, on p. 29, and thereafter it occurs only once again, deleted. But page 29 was not necessarily the start of Cook's take (his name may have been written also on the edge of p. 8) and unless a specimen was first set and submitted to the publishers, it seems likely that Cook set the first 41 pages and then worked on something else.

The next compositor, Rendell, began his taking on the second line of p. 42 and it was marked unusually as beginning mid-sentence, with a square bracket in pencil around the first word of "an hour of joy", a phrase which certainly starts a new line in the page-proofs, on the first page of chapter II. This may therefore be the point at which the general distribution of Part I began.

After the obscure start, the total distribution of takings fell into the following shape: Rendell and L. Bristow cast-off galleys 4-10, Notley 11-16, Moore 17-18, Deacon and Wright 19-30, Knowles 31-34, L. Bristow and Rendell (again) 35-39, F. Bristow and Moore 40-49, Knowles 50-51, and L. Bristow 52.